The tweet is from Anthony Pompliano, also known as Pomp, who works at Morgan Creek Digital Asset, where he manages a cryptocurrency fund. So, have I been wrong all this time about bitcoin? Those who have been reading my articles for some time know that I have been skeptical about the history of bitcoin as money. Instead of fulfilling the vision of Satoshi Nakamoto as a means of exchange for the next generation, bitcoin has been incorporated as a new type of gaming technology-an exciting decentralized zero-sum financial game. This is a somewhat useful feature, but let's admit that it is not as revolutionary as the concept of digital cash. But if the Argentines are really making trips and paying the drivers with bitcoins, as Pompliano seems to say, then it is possible that I have rushed to discard the bitcoin as a possible currency. Making payments for the acquisition of goods or services is precisely the use that Satoshi Nakamoto intended to give to bitcoin. So I inquired a little more about the tweet. And there the exchange ended. It seems then that I have work to do. Here is the small print. In 2016, the city of Buenos Aires ordered the main credit card companies to block the application of Uber. The WILmap project of Stanford Law School has a detailed entry on this subject. So the Argentines suddenly realized that although their MasterCard and Visa cards worked for everything else, they could not use them to pay for a trip in Uber. Contrary to what Pompliano indicates, Uber's response was not to allow users to pay for trips with bitcoins. Rather the company pointed out that anyone with a certain type of prepaid debit card could circumvent the prohibition against Uber. To carry out the trick, the first thing an Argentine had to do was to request a prepaid debit card from Entropay, EcoPayz, Payoneer or ZapZap. These are payment companies not based in Argentina. Entropay, for example, is based in Europe and issues Visa debit cards in partnership with a bank in Malta, the Bank of Valletta. Once Entropay approved the opening of an account to an Argentine, a physical debit card was sent to the applicant's address in Argentina or a virtual card was instantly created. An Argentinean could then enter Entropay's website and use his local credit card to charge Entropay's prepaid debit card, which had been neutralized by the ban against Uber. With funds in the debit card, this could be used at the local level to pay for travel in Uber. In other words, the prepaid cards issued by Entropay are really normal Visa cards. Thus, when a trip was contracted in Uber in Buenos Aires, an Entropay card would have used the same Visa channels as a normal credit card issued in Argentina. Why could an Entropay Visa card be accepted and a normal Visa card rejected?. The crux of the matter seems to be the following: apparently the ban had been applied to payments initiated by cards issued in the local market. When payments to Uber originated from Entropey or one of the above-mentioned cards, they were identified as international trips, in the case of Entropay and possibly from the Bank of Valleta based in Malta, and thus Entropay payments could be avoided the impediments. Voilà: when exchanging local cards for international cards, the Argentines could avoid the blockade. Some bitcoin debit cards also allowed the trick, including Xapo and Satoshi Tango. Possibly this was referred to by Pomp in his tweet. But it would not be correct to say that these cards allowed the Argentines "to hire travel with Bitcoin," as Pomp states. Before paying for a trip in Uber, an Argentine had to load US dollars into the bitcoin debit card by exchanging bitcoins for dollars in a bitcoin market. Either the cardholder did it manually, or the card provider quickly sold bitcoins at the same time the payment was requested. In any case, the bitcoins did not pass directly from the card holder to Uber. A fiduciary currency had been previously loaded onto the card, after that, everything else was simply a common transfer through the Visa or MasterCard network.